“Deadly Experiments”

UK's programme was open and ethical

EDITOR,--The Channel 4 television programme True Stories, entitled “Deadly Experiments,” which was transmitted on 6 July, was highly alarming and in many instances seriously misleading.1 The programme referred to indefensible and unethical experiments involving the administration of plutonium to hospital patients in the United States as an adjunct to the Manhattan project. The programme subsequently claimed that similar “radiation experiments” were carried out in secret in the United Kingdom, without the consent of the participants. The facts, however, are these.

Firstly, the studies in …